MUSIC

MUSIC; If Practice Makes Perfect, Practice Less?

By BERNARD HOLLAND

Published: January 19, 2003

WE underrate imperfection as an expressive device. Music lovers yearn for flawlessness, but when it arrives, there is something missing. A kind of beauty may lie in the act of reaching, however short of the mark it falls. Perhaps humanity feels uncomfortable in a world where nothing discernible is wrong.

I put off playing Murray Perahia's Sony Classical CD of Chopin's 24 Études, nominated for a Grammy for best instrumental solo performance, until a few days ago. These pieces comprise two groups of 12, listed as Opus 10 and Opus 25, and with rare exceptions hearing them end to end means listening to recordings. Few pianists have the courage to try them in real time with people around; they are simply too hard. Even in the recording studio, a certain amount of fear manages to leak through the microphones.

Chopin, the piano composer, was the genius of song form: play a melody, play another melody, come back to the first, embellish everything with whatever twists and turns are desirable. The études, like a palimpsest, bear the traces of song form, but their overt physicality makes them different. Browse through the score. On the page they look odd next to Chopin's other music. Their name explains why. These are studies. Each deals with a technical problem: making the hands do a certain kind of thing on the keyboard. They are usually totally new problems. Musicological tracings of cause and effect notwithstanding, Chopin invented modern piano playing out of the blue. Without him neither Rachmaninoff nor Bill Evans would exist.

Every pianist -- professional or would-be -- has worked on the Chopin études. They explore octaves, chords, legato playing, double notes, arpeggios of different kinds but usually involving uncomfortable stretching of the hands. They are there to teach problem-solving, but so, too, are the dreary exercises of Hanon and Czerny, bogymen of every child at the keyboard. The Chopin études come with wider ambition, prescribing horrendously difficult physical acts that, if properly addressed, promise satisfying music. Chopin's critics, often misguided, complain of his wandering sense of form and organization. In this regard, the études are unassailable. The problem at hand, relentlessly pursued, is the form. The materials of the études are self-organizing.

Mr. Perahia accomplishes astonishing things. Every wicked obstacle is cleared; he heads straight to the musical finish line. Fast tempos seem to accelerate past your memory of them. There is a theory that composers hear their own pieces faster than the musicians who perform them. In other words, what has originated in the composer's head is a kind of gravity-free perpetual-motion machine, one that bypasses the performer as middleman and all the poorly greased gears and inefficient wheels that accompany the playing of an instrument or the functioning of a voice box.

Mr. Perahia's amazing prowess has a little of this feeling. Julius Katchen, the American pianist, was once stopped during a Brahms rehearsal in London by a not unsarcastic conductor, who asked, ''Why do you play that passage so fast?'' Katchen answered, ''Well, you see, I can.'' A nice parry in musical swordplay, but two-edged at best.

There is no more thoughtful, more serious musician among us than Murray Perahia, and no one who has worked harder at articulating the good ideas that run around in his head. He pulls the famous Opus 10, No. 3, for example, out of the feverish, sentimental swamp to which most pianists consign it and restores Chopin's brisker tempo. Indeed, every item leads directly and confidently to the music that lies beyond the technique, so much so that Mr. Perahia's success can be unnerving. Pieces that survive for almost 200 years carry with them a tradition, and in the case of the Chopin études, part of that tradition is failure or, at best, victorious struggle. We are not used to someone who plays the piano as well as this.

Tradition also associates the word ''cold'' with the word ''perfection.'' It is an irony to those who are not cold but who have worked hard to be perfect. The Emerson String Quartet is an intensely musical ensemble, yet the uncanny clarity of its playing takes getting used to. The gut roughness of Beethoven's middle quartets or of the six quartets by Bartok sounds at first to have been airbrushed to a Playboy-centerfold idealization. Actually, it is not, but it takes a while to realize that the Emerson is just telling the truth more clearly than most of its colleagues do.

Some pieces are deemed unplayable until people learn to play them. The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is one. Other pieces are deemed unplayable and really are. Did Beethoven -- deaf and perhaps half mad -- really expect pianists to rattle off the fugue of his ''Hammerklavier'' Sonata? The converse explanation is that our greatest of psychological architects was more clearheaded than we give him credit for: consciously building physical frustration and fear into the musical message. I think the answer lies somewhere in between.

My reaction to Murray Perahia and the Chopin études is more shock than disapproval. Lay it at my door, not his. Maybe the upward progress of virtuosity begins with newly set benchmarks -- to be pursued and soon equaled by others -- and with this CD another one has been set. Am I a victim of some grotesque paradox: disappointment in having my expectations exceeded? Mr. Perahia's virtue makes me a little uncomfortable, but what am I to do? Ask him to play less well?